In 2018, Leslie Fish offered the following blanket permission: ""Blanket permission for non-commercial remix, podfic, translation, art or fanvid creations or secondary fanwork creations of any of my fanworks with credit."[1]

As a Filker

She has written hundreds of songs, including The Horse-Tamer's Daughter; Hope Eyrie, about the Apollo 11 moon landing; and Banned From Argo, about the crew of the starship Enterprise on shore leave. Her songs inspire strong, active emotions -- outrage, joy, humor, or determination.

She wrote her first filksong, "Fellowship Going South," in 1963, in the Lord of the Rings fandom. In 1969, Leslie began writing the filksong, "Hope Eyrie" (a.k.a. "The Eagle Has Landed"), which took six years to complete.

She usually attends filksings with a 12-stringed guitar named "Monster" and a large bottle of something alcoholic with a label that says "Bard Oil," and always has a knife on her, whether you can see it or not.

Song I'm least proud of: "Banned From Argo", no contest! I wrote it to order, to fill in a four-minute shortage on the master tape when we were recording SOLAR SAILORS, and hoo- boy, do I ever regret it! The damned piece of fluff became damn-near as popular as "Hope Eyrie". It's inspired a horde of filk-variations (which Random Factors has collected into a book, gods help them), got asked for at every con for years until I got so heartily sick of it that I refused to sing it again, and now it's inspiring spin-offs too. Arrrgh! [2]

What kind of things do you try to express in your art? Beauty? Sexiness? A good likeness?: "[I try for] “beauty, sexiness and a good likeness, plus expressiveness... My drawings were always illustrations of stories, or at least poems, and I wanted to show the emotional tone of the written work in visual terms.”

Were you conscious of the difficulties of reproduction which choosing a medium?: “Oh yes! I had worked for a couple of newspapers and student art-magazines by then—remember, this was back in the days of mimeograph, ditto, xerox and at best offset printing—and I knew how crudely all of them reproduced. Back then you had to use strong outlines and very simple shading, or it simply wouldn’t reproduce. This gave fanzine illustration a cartoonish look, which I struggled to improve. I rejoiced when more fanzines began using offset printing, because the finer reproduction allowed for subtler lines and better detail.”

What is your favourite medium?: "“Pen and ink: black India ink, bronze Crow-quill pen-point, on Bristol Board. The smoothness of the Bristol Board allows for clean flowing lines and fine stippling, the flexibility of bronze Crow-quill allows great variation in width of line and size of stipple-point, and the stark black of India ink creates excellent contrast with the background.”

Do you feel comfortable drawing erotic art?: “I’d been drawing nudes in my art classes for years, and adding eroticism was an easy step. Also, since my first erotic drawings were illustrations for my own stories, I had no worries about what the author might think!”

As a K/S Advocate and Writer

During the K/S wars in the late '70s-early '80s, Leslie was a passionate supporter of K/S, writing a column in Interstat and sending LoCs to other Trek zines of the time defending fans' rights to write K/S, and even taking to task those who didn't believe that Kirk and Spock were lovers. She wrote some of the first works that crossed the line from gen to slash. [3]Shelter, (published in Warped Space #20), is one of these stories. Her K/S slash is included in the ksarchive.com, as well as Foresmutters project. [4] She's also a writer of fantasy in several fandoms, and has collaborated with Mercedes Lackey on several projects, both filk and prose.

To appreciate what Leslie accomplished in K/S fandom, you have to hark back to the early days of K/S, when there were HUGE debates in fandom about whether K/S was possible, appropriate or "in character" for either or both of the two guys. The discussion was rarely, if ever, cast in terms of a "slash imperative": The question wasn't whether K/S was necessary, but whether it was a viable premise at all. Leslie Fish was probably the most articulate advocate for the K/S premise of anyone in fandom at the time. She persuaded not only through her stories, but through a steady stream of well-reasoned argument in panel discussions, LoCs and articles in genzines. In every fannish forum of the day, she laid out the conceptual groundwork for K/S. Her basic argument was that bisexuality is natural, that 20th century gender roles and sexual preferences are learned and can be unlearned, and that a sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock was a natural progression of the love and affection they plainly shared. Her logic of slash was not so much erotic as it was intellectual and scientific. It spoke powerfully to an audience of thirty-something middle-class women in the 1970s who'd grown up in a society where heterosexuality was regarded as "natural" and homosexuality was not. Leslie outlined an alternate framework for understanding sexuality. It was one that many fans shared instinctively, but Leslie articulated the reasoning behind it. [5]

From Leslie Herself:

I used to be a Trekker -- actually got my start in writing by doing stories and poems for Trek-zines (and of course, I made myself infamous there, too; I was the third writer to ever tackle the K/S theme -- Diane Marchant was first, with the story "A Fragment Out of Time", and Gerry Downes followed with "Alternatives", but my stories "Shelter" and "Poses" really shoved the theme into mainstream Trek-fandom, for which I got the expected flak) -- but I sort of lost interest when NEXT GENERATION came along; it's just too pusey, Yuppie-ish, and bloodless for my tastes. Hmm, I don't know if this counts as a hobby, but I like good SF/ST/adventure porno. Ghu knows, I've written enough X-rated Trek stuff to have a taste for that! [6]